This student's state barred her from its best public universities, so she went to the Ivy League instead

Growing up and attending school in northern Georgia, Valentina
Garcia Gonzalez exuded confidence in the academic arena.

She was accepted into gifted classes and took more than two dozen
Advanced Placement (AP) courses at Berkmar High School, a public
school in Lilburn, Georgia, right outside Atlanta.

But that confidence began to waver when she was applying for
colleges and realized that Georgia's best public schools wouldn't
let her in for one reason.

Her immigration status.

"Am I less of a student? Am I less worthy?" she recalled. "Why
don’t I deserve it the way" other students do?

Today, at 19 years of age, she is a freshman at an Ivy League
university, but her road to acceptance at one of America's top
schools hasn't been easy.

Garcia Gonzalez entered the US illegally in 2002, traveling with
her parents as a 6-year-old.

Now, there are two barriers to a college education in Georgia for
undocumented students such as Garcia Gonzalez, and the Georgia
Board of Regents instituted both in 2011.

Policy
4.1.6 effectively bars undocumented applicants from applying
to Georgia's top five public universities: the University of
Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia College and State
University, Georgia Regents University, and Georgia Institute of
Technology.

Other US states have different rules about tuition and
application eligibility for undocumented students, but Georgia
sets itself apart from many states by barring immigrants who
entered the US illegally from selective universities and
barring them from receiving in-state tuition.

Valentina Garcia Gonzalez

Even though she attended high school in Georgia, Garcia Gonzalez
knew nothing about these policies. She says she didn't try to
hide her status, and even "came out" as undocumented to her
classmates her freshman year at Berkmar.

"I came out because of anti-immigrant sentiment," she said.

Her school was predominately black and Latino, but she was the
only one to announce her undocumented status.

"I thought it was weird that I was the only one who came out,"
she said. "But I came to understand later on that it was the
stigma of being undocumented; being seen as less than who you are
because you didn’t have a piece of paper."

Undaunted by appearing different, she excelled in school and took
seven AP courses — the maximum allowed — in her senior year.

She started applying to colleges, unaware of the bans that would
prohibit her from attending schools or receiving financial aid.

She first found out about her ineligibility for financial aid
when she attempted to submit the Free Application for Federal
Student Aid (FAFSA) form for federal financial aid.

She enlisted the help of Freedom
U, an organization that describes itself as a modern-day
freedom school, to help her navigate the college application
process.

Freedom U offers college-level classes, financial-aid assistance,
and leadership development classes for undocumented students in
Georgia.

She discovered she was ineligible to receive federal financial
aid and barred from Georgia's most selective public universities.

Unable to apply to a top public university in Georgia, she
weighed her options. If she attempted to apply to a private
school — Emory University, for example — and was accepted she
would have to pay the $45,000 a year it costs for tuition.

At the time she applied, Emory didn't offer need-based financial
aid to undocumented students. That
policy changed recently.

She said that for the first time in her life she felt isolated.
By cultural standards, Garcia Gonzalez says she is most
definitely American. Born in Uruguay, she moved to Georgia at 6
and lived there for the next 14 years.

She has grown up among her friends and classmates, taken the same
classes, and gets the same pop-culture references. But as all of
them were preparing for the next step in their lives, she was
stuck, unable to move forward with her college plans.

Valentina Garcia Gonzalez

The policies in place in Georgia effectively constitute modern
educational segregation, according to Freedom U.

Garcia Gonzalez started working with Freedom U her senior year in
high school and, at their recommendation, took a gap year between
her senior year in high school and freshman year in college to
aggressively pursue college applications.

Garcia Gonzalez said that after learning at the 11th hour that
attending a good public university in Georgia would be
impossible, she thought community college was her only option.
But looking at her academic success, Freedom U pushed her to work
to get into a selective school.

With Freedom U she toured college campuses during her gap year,
and applied to nine different schools. She was accepted into
Dartmouth College and started her freshman year this past fall.
She's considering studying neuroepidemiology, a field that looks
at the characteristics and contributors to neurological diseases
in human populations.

She says she considered running for a student-body position but
decided against it after received harassing messages claiming
she'd be deported. She also noted, with surprise, that Dartmouth
was more conservative than she expected. But she remains
undaunted in her pursuit of success and is reconsidering a run in
student government.